In the last decades, the growth of digitalisation of banks’ and insurance companies’ information systems has led to an increase in the number of those business processes consisting in potential repetitive activities, prone to errors and likely to make employees’ work uninspiring.
In order to make these activities more productive and qualitive, companies may consider to avail of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA consists in the realisation of software robots performing activities employees normally carry out, to make sure they can perform other tasks such as exceptions’ analysis and management.
The market offers several products that allow RPA implementation, making development tools available to implement robots and cloud platforms for their execution monitoring.

Analysing processes to automate

Before moving to robots’ realisation, it is necessary to develop a comprehensive analysis of the business processes that are intended to be automated, involving domain experts with a detailed knowledge. This must be done by identifying manual activities, software systems, applications, document structure, information used in such processes and how it is processed.

Once the process to be automated and the tasks composing it are detected and analysed, it is necessary to design the architecture where the robot must operate, considering the number of robots required to perform such process and whether it can be split up in phases to be executed in an asynchronous and transactional way: for instance, a first phrase of information collection to be stored in a “queue” and a second phase where information written in the queue is withdrawn to be processed.

Besides, it is necessary to identify any other system involved in the process and how it interacts with the robot, for example either via graphical interface or through protocols such as REST and SOAP.

Robotisation: from idea to practice

By this time, we can proceed with the implementation of the robot using a product chosen from those available in the market and the development tool made available by them. Implementation can take place incrementally, automating the analysed activities and then the rest of them, as more detailed information is gradually collected.

The development tools provide components and features that allow to easily implement the tasks that the robot is to perform, such as:

To ensure that the robot navigates a portal, there are available tools. These tools enable the robot to open the browser, select the correct links, enter the data in the right text boxes, click the correct components and download the necessary documents only.

To achieve this result, it is necessary to be precise in locating the correct component of the portal and pay attention to the timing, since the robot could be very fast and would try to select the desired component (e.g. download button), before its actual display.

Besides, the robot may not be able to locate the correct component it needs while browsing, due to confusion with other components. To avoid so, companies might use tools such as selectors that, employing XML elements and Wildcards, allow to define the html attributes to enable the robot to identify the component to be uniquely selected.

Precision and caution are required to set attributes’ values and to use Wildcards, performing several tests, as some values may change in different browsing sessions, so the robot might not uniquely locate the component in the browser and generate exceptions.

How does texts’ reading of documents in PDF format happen?

We will talk about it in the next article, stay in touch.